TV dialogue ‘was sharper in old days’

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The American star Kevin Spacey may have proclaimed it a “golden age of television”, but one of Britain’s best-known actors has complained that domestic audiences are still too often treated condescendingly by programme-makers.

Stephen Tompkinson, the star of DCI Banks, Wild at Heart and a new BBC drama Truckers, has bemoaned that in most British TV dramas “you’re lucky if a big scene is three pages long”.

“There’s a misconception that audiences can’t cope if you talk too fast or too long. And I just think, ‘Well, they always used to be able to cope’,” he said in an interview